


Halfway House

by moodiful819



Category: Naruto
Genre: Angst, F/M, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-16
Updated: 2015-02-16
Packaged: 2018-03-13 04:31:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 572
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3367988
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moodiful819/pseuds/moodiful819
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Friendship, ambiguity, and the pangs of getting older.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Halfway House

"Hey Kakashi, what are we?"

The question was posed in a predawn grey, the words murmured and half-muffled by his chest where her head lay. Together in bed, they stared half at the ceiling and half at each other, and while he had an arm around her shoulder and she had an arm flung over his waist, the first thing that struck him was the absence of an honorific after his name.

_When had she stopped calling him “sensei?”_

The others had never stopped. Though he constantly told them he was no longer their teacher, it was a habit they never broke. Honestly he had never expected them to. The title gave him authority, a comfortable distance between him and his pupils. Without it, his name sounded intimate, vulnerable.

But maybe that had more to do with the woman in his bed than anything else.

How this started, he could only vaguely remember in fog-framed clips, tracing instead the well-worn emotional certainty that it had been a necessity on a semi-important mission: that they had no room in their budget for an additional bed, that they had both desperately wanted to sleep, and that in the face of bone-crunching, nauseating exhaustion, neither wanted to take the lumpy, mangled mess of a sofa-bed in the corner.

They both took the bed that night, sleeping soundly, tucked politely into their respective halves, and woke up early the next day to be on their way.

Since then, there had been multiple occurrences of their sleepovers.

He wanted to say it was out of convenience and friendliness—she lived further away from the hospital, and it wasn’t like his couch was ever really occupied—but if he was honest with himself, there was a bit of loneliness motivating him too. It was the only reason that could explain why he continued to save a spot for her in his bed, long after the couch had been fixed.

Idly, he drummed his fingers on the comfortable curve of her shoulder, unthinking as it morphed into short, lingering brushes.

Which was about as far as they ever got. Though their bodies had inched progressively closer with every night spent together, they had never slept with each other. Though they had lain in each other’s arms and knew the feel of the other’s hands through their hair as they prepped for missions and shared the inanities of their day, their touches were stringently platonic. They had never done anything that would give either of them cause for regret.

Except somehow they did.The untapped potential of what lay between them haunted them.

Their open secret was a lake of thin ice over murky water. Though the  _"What if?"_  in Sakura’s eyes was innocent enough, Kakashi could feel the sirens waiting to grab him and drown him as soon as he stopped toeing the blurred lines of their relationship. There were too many of his demons in those waters; to dip a foot in would be to take the plunge.

But it was a question that begged an answer; Kakashi knew he owed her that at least.

But as he stared into Sakura’s green eyes, he found himself speechless.

"I don’t know," he said at last, and he meant every grain of truth in those words. He didn’t know what to classify themselves as. All he knew was that they weren’t "just friends."

They hadn’t been for quite a while.


End file.
